Narrative comprehension, a set of interrelated basic cognitive skills, is essential for societal participation. While it is an open question if acute stress boosts or impairs performance in basic cognitive skills, no study examined the influence of acute stress on narrative comprehension. Interestingly, in basic cognitive tasks, older people seem able to apply more effective coping strategies than younger people. To explore the influence of stress on narrative comprehension in different age groups, two pre-registered experiments tested a student (M = 23 years, N = 203) and an elderly sample (M = 67 years, N = 216) using a bridging event generation task. Participants read picture stories with three panels, with the middle panel blanked, and indicated the content of the blanked panel (i.e., the bridging event). In both experiments, the experimental group was exposed to a stress induction while the control group performed a neutral stress-free task before the bridging event test. While acute stress negatively impacted bridging inference generation and confidence in answers in the student sample, the elderly sample was unaffected by the stress induction. We speculate that the elderly participants are more effective in applying coping strategies than the student sample. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between acute stress and visual narrative comprehension, emphasizing the importance of considering age as an important influencing factor.